Almost Heaven

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

December 16, 2007

Text: Isaiah 35:1-10 and Matthew 11:2-6

LET’S FACE IT

Have you ever had a “Let’s face it” friend? You are optimistic about ability of a common friend to get their act together. But your “Let’s face it” friend knows all of the reasons why they won’t change.

What is the good of dreaming?

You have envisioned a wonderful new year ahead for yourself, but your realistic friend, with a knowing grin and a raised eyebrow, pecks away at your resolve.

Or maybe there are at least two sides to your personality, one hopeful and another deeply skeptical and you never know which one is going to get up in the morning.

Why look forward to a better world? Surely it is tempting to be a modern day cynic or stoic and accept as best we can whatever Fate (with a capital “F”) delivers?

How can we get a grip on the mindset of “Let’s face it?”

Walter Brueggemann, Biblical scholar, says that we live in a time of “deep dislocation” or “displacement.” “Exile” may be another word for “dislocation,” as in the feeling that the world we live in does not feel anymore like home. We may feel like strangers in a strange land.
 (Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, 2000)

The people of ancient Israel had suffered greatly. The temple had been destroyed  and the city had been burned; their king was exiled and the wealthy citizens had been deported; their life as a nation and religious community seemed to be over. Some of the most poignant laments of the Hebrew people were written during this time. For example, Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”
But the second Isaiah sees a new day coming. The Babylonians would be defeated by Cyrus, King of Persia (October 29, 593BC). There was joyful anticipation. The Exiles (or their children) would be returned to their promised land.

They were exiles coming home to a place they had never been before, but which they imagined to be their true home.

Isaiah sees this future home and the transformation of God’s people, recorded now in the 35th chapter.
“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.
“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
It seems to me that we can identify with the exiles in their captivity. Can we also identify with them in their hopes and dreams for a transformed homeland?
I do not think it overstates the case to say that we are like these exiles in many ways. We may feel like Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep and woke up years later and everything had changed. We haven’t moved, but the world has.

I sit in front of the television and observe a world that is alien to me in so many ways: panel discussions that are shouting matches; reality shows that are unreal; survival shows that pit contestants against each other like pit bulls in a ring; fighting matches that apparently have no rules; half-time show sponsored by the Salvation Army, complete with Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders dancing. (What’s up with that?) Churches selling peace of mind like narcotics, inviting us to turn on and tune out and turn inward----or to believe and get rich. Worship and entertainment are mixed together into Vegas-type events.

When we are honest, privileged people that we are, we also realize that we are losing our place as the sole actors on history’s stage. The world is more diverse and complicated-- racially, religiously, culturally. As Carl Sandberg told us, the challenge for the future may be “how to crowd and still be kind.”

LANGUAGE FOR OUR HOPES AND FEARS

We are blessed that the Bible gives us language of lamentation, complaint, protest and anger. “I cry with my voice to the Lord, with my voice I make supplication to the Lord.” (Psalm 142) “”Let the wicked together fall into their own nets while I escape.” (Psalm 141) These among many other psalms can give words to our feelings. We need to remember that our ancestors in the faith were very frank in expressing their disappointment and complaints to God.

We can be honest about our fears and feelings of homesickness.

But the Bible will not let us resign from humanity or settle for superficial gladness or look for scapegoats. Or just become complainers or haters. For, along with our honesty regarding our experiences of exile, of homesickness, the Bible offers us a grand story of God’s coming into our lives and making all things new.

The old, old biblical saga is summarized in the Great Thanksgivings which we use for Holy Communion.

We lift up our hearts to give thanks and praise to the God who has “breathed into us the breath of life,” who has loved us even when we have turned away, spoken to us through prophets and teachers, came to be with us in saving power in Jesus of Nazareth, gave us the Holy Spirit to guide and energize us, molded us into a koinonia with a mission to serve God’s reign and proclaim the good news of Christ to all the nations. We remember the sacrificial love of God shown in Jesus who is, even now, mysteriously present with us in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the wine. The past is brought into the present and we lean toward the future with our hearts in our hands, daring to tell God that we will stick with his dream for creation until “we feast at his heavenly banquet!”

Every time I lead us in this prayer I am aware of the profound nerve it takes for us to stand here in the middle of our beautiful and dangerous world and declare our trust in God. We declare our solidarity with our Jewish parents in the faith: their history is our too, completed, we believe, by the coming of Jesus of Nazareth. We stake our claim.

God acts. God interacts. We believe that God acts now and will in the future in the same ways that God has acted in out history.

God has liberated people from slavery and still does. God has brought nations to judgment and crisis for overreaching and cruelty, and still does. God healed and still does. God raises up prophets like Isaiah and Amos for our time. God comforts broken hearts, saying “Fear not” to frightened and bewildered disciples.

Our lives and our histories can always be read differently. We may find it to be difficult to believe that God is yet working as in ancient times----and we may believe that history is just one thing after another, with no direction at all.  It takes disciplined attentiveness to believe and always has. For “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11)

ADVENT DREAMS

Every year, in the seasons of Advent and Christmas, we are invited to read the ancient dreams of “peace on earth, good will to all.” These beautiful prophecies of Isaiah, coupled with the stories of Jesus’ birth, are poignant reminders of hope. They are the Christian Church’s annual protest that God reigns and that the hopes and fears of all the years are met in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. We show and tell the ancient vision of a world healed and made whole.

Our lives are shaped by the stories and images that we hear and see over and over, the ones we repeat and rehearse. Each Advent and Christmas and Epiphany we tell the enchanting stories, not just for sentiment or nostalgia, but for faith’s sake.

Television is a wondrous teaching tool. “Law and Order” has been one of my favorite shows for many years. I have learned (true or not) that the work of apprehending and trying suspects is a dicey business; that deals are made to get convictions; that sometimes the perpetrators beat the system; and that female assistant district attorneys are always beautiful! The continuing success of this show (on at all hours, it seems) is an indication of our fascination with violence and evil. This show and others like it teach us that the world is a dangerous place and it’s an uphill struggle to approximate justice.

Movies are, often as not, about vengeance. There has been a spate of movies lately about people taking justice into their own hands. We are mesmerized by assault rifles. We are fascinated by warriors of all types: samurais, cowboys, soldiers, bounty hunters, swat teams, terrorists, gang members.

Now there are many other stories portrayed in movies and on TV that do not concentrate on mayhem. But the popularity of stories of violence, I believe, has its effect on our psyches----especially on the minds of our young. (Our latest atrocity has featured a depressed young adult who declares in a note that he is useless, but that he will be “famous” after he has killed innocent people and himself.)

There is plenty of violence in the Bible, too! But the core motif in the Bible is that God interacts with human beings for purposes of justice, mercy, righteousness and peace.

The stories in the Bible illuminate our lives, bring us to judgment before a holy God, and instill hope into us again.

For example, God hears and sees the misery of the Hebrews in slavery in Egypt, and calls Moses to be his leader to free the people.

It is no accident that African slaves who heard the gospel message and learned the stories of the Bible latched on to the Exodus story as their story. “Let my people go.” In the horror of the Civil War, God was working out God’s justice in the land. Could it have been done otherwise? Perhaps. We will never know. But God interacted with free human beings so that the truth was marching on.

Jesus died, taking on himself all that evil forces could load on him, printing indelibly on our minds the depth of God’s love for us and the forgiveness of our sins. But God raised Jesus up, affirming that Jesus’ revelation of God’s love for the last the least and the lost----for the whole world----was the truth about God.

Every time we think that all is lost, we remember this story and dare to hope that God is the Life-Giver, and that not even death can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

VISIONARIES

What I am saying is that when we remember and rehearse the dreams of Isaiah, we are led to be visionaries. Touching our history gives us braver hearts for the future----our own and the world’s. To believe that God acts in our lives in our times does not mean that we can simply sit back. We do our best work for God when we work from hope instead of fear.

Today, we envision Isaiah’s dreamland, a place and time of “streams in the desert,” and where the blind have their sight restored and the voiceless sing for joy! Where people you are refugees can go home. Where there is joy.

Are we just hopeless optimists? No, we are hope-full believers in the God who is involved in our lives and in our times. Bruggemann, again: “One can almost sense in this daring poetry of Isaiah the dancing lightness of a small child who refuses the weary soberness of jaded adults who have held the world too long on one position.”

Or as he quotes Frederick Buechner from his book Longing for Home, “We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we envision is our true home, which beckons us.” (Deep Memory, Exuberant hope, page 66) Albert Einstein said that “imagination is more important than information.” Quite a statement in a world so information hungry!

Because of the stories of Jesus’ birth, for example, we see life differently, as Thomas John Carlisle has expressed in a poem called “Nativity:”

It was all about me
before I bothered
to look out
my insulated window.
Quieter than I
and willing
to work in small
crystallizations,
it set me
thinking of One
who comes
in minimal
but basic
terms. (Celebration, 1970, page 11)

Again, Advent and Christmas are about imagination. In the face of wars and poverty and danger, we imagine God’s vision of the world the way it is supposed to be, and will be someday.

Meanwhile, we “describe the forms of the incarnation” in protest of those who insist that, with the gift of Jesus, nothing has changed. Amos Wilder, Old Testament Scholar of years past, wrote this poem in 1972.

Dialogue at Christmas

One of the minim burst in on the Rabbi and exclaimed:
            "The Messiah has come!"
The Rabbi went to the window and looked out, and demurred:
            "Nothing has changed.

“As of old,
Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, day and night;
A generation goes and a generation comes but the earth remaineth the same. What is crooked is not made straight.
“As of old,
A time to weep and a time to laugh,
A time to mourn and a time to dance,
A time to love and a time to hate,
A time for war and a time for peace;
There is nothing new under the sun.
The king tarrieth.
What is wanting is not made up."

NEVERTHELESS, the Kingdom has come;
Behind the scenes, a clandestine irruption;
A fission in the world's grain,
A benign conflagration.
0 Lord, open the eyes of thy servant:
Behold, the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire.

Nothing has changed? But listen:
Tellurian [earthly] tremors,
Convulsions at the earth's core,
The silent collapse of parapets.
Moorings have parted
And we are carried away into new latitudes.

The Kingdom cometh not with observation,
But it has overtaken us
Dispelling old obsessions.

Therefore this dancing through iron doors,
This singing our way through blind walls,
This mocking of old hierarchic dooms,
Levitation across impassable wastes.

Therefore these hilarities, against all reason,
And charities welling up for no cause,
Righteousness appears from nowhere, like dew,
The earth opens and joy springs in the furrows
And the angels acclaim it from pole to pole.

Amos N. Wilder

Every now and then, we are privileged to see the world as it is meant to be, places and circumstances that are “almost heaven.” I think this is because the dream of a just and peaceful Shalom-world is deeply engrained in us, as those who have been made in God’s image and are having that image restored as behold God in the face of Jesus Christ. We travel home with home in us, as someone once said.

Maybe as you make your way to work on a given day, you actually see real people, not actors, who are being kind to one another, helpful and civil.

Or you observe old enemies making up.

You see a politician go against the current and work to reform our prison systems.

Or you see the old ruined land restored by careful reclamation.

You hear of legislators, long time adversaries, meeting on a deeper level as friends as they go through a family crisis together.

Or you are carried away by the gift of a piece of music performed with such authenticity that you shed tears of joy.

 All of these are hints of the way the world is supposed to be and will be in fullness someday. We know the real thing when we see it, even for the first time.

When you find the same sentiment in writers as different as John Denver and St Augustine, you might want to pay attention.

“He was born in the summer of his 27th year,
Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before.
He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again,
You might say he found a key for every door.”
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/john+denver/rocky+mountain+high_20073260.html

St Augustine (354-430 AD), coming to faith in God, wrote “I came back to what I knew, but did not know that I knew.”

We rejoice as those who see visions and dream dreams.

PATIENCE

And we learn patience.

The epistle lesson for today is from James 5:7-10.

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. 8You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.”

What he is telling his brothers and sisters in Christ is that they must wait patiently for the fullness of God’s reign. By this he does not mean that they are to do nothing. But they are to live and work in a resting frame of mind!

We, too, are invited to live as those who believe “that the will of God for the well-being of the world will indeed prevail over all that is distorted and pathological.” We are freed from despair, as if nothing can change; and we are freed from anxious striving, as if the building of a better world depends on us alone. We are “directed to the reality of God, the very God whom we discern in our present and to whom we entrust our future.” This means that we can be “buoyant in the face of seemingly permanent suffering.” (Texts for Preaching)

I do not want to minimize the costliness of discipleship. “Every act of selfless love is a little death.” (William Blake) It’s not easy being “peculiar people,” as I Peter describes us. Our distinctiveness is not found in a closed-minded avoidance of scientific discoveries, as some seem to think. Our distinctiveness is in our capacity to love the neighbor, even when they are strangers or enemies. This will take courage and perseverance that we do not have by our own strength. It is given to us to translate God dreams into behaviors and laws and actions which deliver genuine help for hurting people.

I heard Julio Medina Wednesday morning being interviewed about Exodus Transitional Ministries. It is “a fellowship of incarcerated individuals that helps people coming out of prison build stable lives and fully integrate into society.” (etcny.org) Julio, the Executive Director, spent years in prison himself. He has a lasting conversion to Christian faith, even involving him in theological education while in prison. He knew the odds against him and his fellow inmates. When he was paroled, he began a ministry to help ex-prisoners with the basics. Many had been in prison and had become unable to function on the outside. Housing, jobs, spiritual life, contributing to the community where you did harm, health. Against the stream of opinion “lock them up and throw away the key,” they see the potential of the men and women as children of God. They demonstrate the model of successful life; they have been there. (AA model)

A drop in the bucket? Maybe. But we are called to build and support signs of a new day, a new creation. And we are called to seek justice and mercy in public policies of our community, nation and state. “God works against our exhaustion, our despair, and our sense of being subject to fate.” (Texts for Preaching, Year A, page 19)

JESUS TRANSLATES THE DREAM INTO ACTIONS

John the Baptist sent a message to Jesus: “Are you the Messiah or shall we wait for someone else?” Maybe John, who was mostly about judgment, thought that a proper Messiah would give out more critiques than comfort. But Jesus’ response is straight out of Isaiah: “Go and tell John that the blind see, the deaf hear, the poor hear good news and the dead are raised. And happy is the one who does not find these actions to be stumbling blocks to belief.”

Jesus spent time bringing hope to those who could do very little to help themselves: the sick, the condemned, the deranged, the lost sons and daughters of Israel. This, he said and demonstrated, is the dream of God. Jesus is the sign that God “has sworn his unending hostility to slavery, exile and death.” And God invites---urges us---to begin to live out the truth of God’ dream for the world right now, to be “covenant partners, enjoying his freedom, at home in his presence, affirming his life in us.” (The Bible Makes Sense, page 89)

This Advent and Christmas seasons, will you dedicate yourself to be a visionary in Christ, one who “lives out the implication of the divine refusal to accept the world as it is as final.”  (Source unknown) Will you dare to dream, to imagine the world redeemed?

“Strengthen your weak hands and make firm your feeble knees. Say to those of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.’”